Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art

by Marina van Zuylen

"This book is about the obsessive strategies people use to keep the arbitrary out of their lives; it is about the fanaticism and intolerance linked to their ideas of perfection and permanence.... Those readers who have brushed against the dangers of the idée fixe, who have come close to surrendering to something or someone diabolically seductive or coercive, will recognize in these characters their own encounter with a dangerously systematized world."―From the introduction. Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the idée fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marina van Zuylen revives the term monomania to explore the therapeutic attributes of obsession. She introduces us to artists and collectors, voyeurs and scholars, hypochondriacs and melancholics, whose lives are run by debilitating compulsions that may become powerful weapons against the tyranny of everyday life. In van Zuylen's view, there is a productive tension between disabling fixations and their curative powers; she argues that the idée fixe has acted as a corrective for the multiple disorders of modernity. The authors she studies―Charles Baudelaire, Sophie Calle, Elias Canetti, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann among them―embody or set in motion different manifestations of this monomaniacal imperative. Their protagonists or alter egos live more intensely, more meaningfully, because of the compulsive pressures they set up for themselves. Monomania shows that transforming life into art, or at least into the artful, drives out the anxiety of the void and puts in its place something so orderly and meaningful that it can take on the aura of a religion.

252 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 2005

About the author

Marina van Zuylen was initially educated in Paris, France.
She received her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
She has taught at Harvard in the Literature Concentration and was Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French at Columbia University. She is now Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College, where she chairs the Literature Program.

Reviews

[Hannah Herschend · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely amazing, well developed research (literary, sociological, psychological) on the phobia of everyday life (meaningless existence) dealt with through obsession, especially masochism. Seems like this has been a massive blind spot in so much discourse, such a thrilling book to read!

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book on literary examples of monomania... I think Lacan would call obsessive neurosis. Monomania is a term from Pierre Janet. I pulled the book because I am interested in Nina Bouraoui, and there is a chapter on it, which is excellent.